What’s immediately striking about The Samurai and the Prisoner—the latest from master Japanese filmmaker Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and his first foray into jidaigeki—is that, despite set in the end stages of the Sengoku period, is how modern it feels. It’s set in an old castle, and everyone is dressed up in period-appropriate garb (unlike some other recent modernized imaginings of now-ancient times), yet Kurosawa’s film cuts through the antiquated formalities to find something stranger than mere archaic mystique.
Kurosawa shoots Arioka Castle like he would with any of his contemporary environments, with a keen sense for architecture. The castle, to Kurosawa, is as inspired a place to find unexpected streaks of light on a wall as any modern building, and the space is already perfectly designed to fit Kurosawa’s penchant for capturing multiple rooms in a single composition. Beneath the castle is a dungeon, with an uneven flow of dirt for floors and massive, off-putting pillars holding everything up in this dank and dusty environment hiding just underneath the more clean and pristine castle surface. It's a typical Kurosawa space.
Moreover, the dungeon is where a hint of hypnosis begins to come into play. While Kurosawa’s films can often veer from their realistic worlds straight into the fantastical—ghosts, an evil tree, or the sudden end of the world—The Prisoner and the Samurai is much more cautious in how it leans into something beyond the boundaries of earthly existence; mesmeric qualities could simply be learned skill, and a lightning strike may merely be coincidence. This restraint in portraying things that could be read as supernatural is inverse to what Kurosawa usually does in his contemporary settings, but brilliantly, they create a similar ambiguity; the contemporary world is subverted by what we know is impossible, while the past loses its innate aura by becoming grounded and, therefore, a strange place for more subtle mystery.
In navigating this new genre territory for him, Kurosawa also leans on the familiar. It’s like a joke that the opening section of his first jidaigeki film is dominated by a murder mystery, where a samurai has to briefly play the role of crime scene detective. Perhaps it’s a reason Kurosawa was drawn to the Honobu Yonezawa novel of the same name that The Samurai and the Prisoner is based on, but that material also lends itself to something decidedly un-Kurosawan in how talk-y it is. The Samurai and the Prisoner is one of the director’s most dialogue-heavy films. It’s one that relies on it most heavily for plot information, which is made up of a huge host of retainers and daimyos that the audience needs to keep track of.
Then in another sense, this makes the film like many of Kurosawa's others in how they exist in the world; they’re difficult to sell. His odd, languid pace paired with unconventional turns in his genre films make them anything but what they might seem to be from a poster or trailer. The Prisoner and the Samurai is no exception. It's one of the best examples of it: it’s a film that can have a few clips of war taken out of context for a 15-second ad, and convince people they’re going to see something closer to Akira Kurosawa than Kiyoshi Kurosawa. The movie that people will show up to see will have some brief moments of combat, but it’s reaching for something far more cerebral, something that gets under your skin and festers rather than just cutting it.